LATTE vs WINE: A Surprising Comparison with Dry Indiana Wines & Favorite Coffee Drinks
Our wine of the month right now is our Millions of Peaches, which is one of our sweetest wines at 30 g/L. Sounds like a lot, but for context let's play a little game.
Which has more sugar: a glass of our Peaches wine or a Grande Vanilla Latte from your neighborhood Starbucks?
If you guessed the latte, congratulations, you were right!
Bonus round, which has more sugar: a bottle of our Peaches wine or a Grande Vanilla Latte? If you guessed the Latte again, congrats smarty pants! Lol. In fact, an entire bottle of Millions of Peaches has about 23g of sugar and that Grande Vanilla Latte has around 35g of sugar. A seemingly innocuous latte has 50% more sugar than entire bottle of semi-sweet wine. Let that sink in.
What makes it extra surprising is that sugar shows up in wine talk constantly. Given how frequently it's discussed you'd assume wine was one of the most sugary drinks out there, but it's far from the truth. So grab a glass (or a mug, we don't judge), and let's use our two beloved drinks (coffee and wine) to cultivate a little clarity on sugar.
The Showdown: Wine vs. Latte
Below you'll find a list of some of our dry (and sweet) Indiana wines along side common coffee drinks. For each beverage I have listed the serving size, the sugar content for that serving size, and the sugar concentration as grams per liter (how wineries usually measure and report sugar content, if they do at all).
Drink | Serving Size | Sugar Per Serving | Sugar Concentration |
Americano | Grande 16 fl oz | 0 g | 0 g/L |
(Dry Red) | 1 Glass 5 fl oz | ~0.1 g | ~0.6 g/L |
(Brüt Natural) | 1 Glass 5 fl oz | ~0.5 g | ~3 g/L |
(Off-dry Bubbly) | 1 Glass 5 fl oz | ~2.1 g | ~14 g/L |
(Semi-sweet Bubbly) | 1 Glass 5 fl oz | ~4.5 g | ~30 g/L |
Cortado | 8 fl oz | ~6 g | ~25 g/L |
Blackberry Bliss (Semi-sweet Bubbly) | 1 Glass 5 fl oz | ~6.8 g | 45 g/L |
Vanilla Latte | Grande 16 fl oz | ~35 g | ~74 g/L |
Pumpkin Spiced Latte | Grande 16 fl oz | ~50 g | ~106 g/L |
Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino | Grande 16 fl oz | ~60 g | ~127 g/L |
(Coffee figures are based on nutritional data available on Starbucks.com/menu)
Pretty eye-opening? It was for me even as a winemaker of 10 years. One of the very first questions asked in the wine world is a question of how dry or sweet a wine is when in fact, even our Blackberry Bliss (currently our sweetest) pale in comparison with most coffee drinks.
Outside of a black coffee or espresso, the cortado had the lowest sugar content by far of any coffee drinks we found. One 8oz cortado had the almost the same amount of sugar as a glass of Blackberry Bliss. And that small cortado on your way to work carries roughly 12x the sugar of the Riesling Natúr brüt natural sparkling wine in your glass at girls' night.
Ordering a Grande Pumpkin Spiced Latte or a Caramel Ribbon Frappuccino? Well would it change your mind if you knew how many more glasses of wine you could get to To get the same amount of sugar? One Grande PSL has the same sugar content of 500 glasses of Pinot Noir...FIVE HUNDRED GLASSES!!! That's 100 bottles (or 8 cases plus 4 bottles) of Pinot Noir! Just in case you're wondering, we don't recommend trying to drink 500 glasses of Pinot Noir 🥴 or even 7 glasses of Blackberry Bliss in one sitting.
None of this is a knock on coffee or latte lovers (we love our Hoosier coffee shops as much as the next). It's just a reminder that the scales we use in wine to talk about sugar are on a different spectrum than other drinks in our daily lives. "Dry" doesn't mean flavorless, and "sweet" isn't a dirty word - it's a spot on a spectrum, same as your coffee order. It's measured, it's intentional, and it's often startlingly low.
Why We Lean Bubbly & Dry for our Indiana Wines
Most of what we make is sparkling or bubbly like champagne. Part of it is we were looking for a way to eliminate the environmental impact of the glass bottles so we pursued kegging. Another reason is we wanted to only use local fruit and local fruit tends to be the perfect profile for sparkling.
Our wines also lean on the drier end of the spectrum. We believe what we put in our bodies and thus our wines is important. We also believe in minimal intervention preferring to let the fruit and the fizz do the talking instead of leaning on sugar to cover for it. It's the same instinct behind growing regeneratively and kegging instead of bottling where we can: less added, more honest, better for the land and the people.
That said - sweet has its place, too. A semi-sweet peach-infused wine on a July porch is its own kind of joy, and we're not here to tell you dry is morally superior. We just think you deserve to know what's actually in your glass, whether it's ours or the one from the drive-thru.
So next time someone at the tasting bar asks whether our wine is "sweet," you can tell them: less sweet than their coffee order. Stick around below if you want the full breakdown of what dry, off-dry, and sweet actually mean.
🤓 NERD ALERT! ⚠️: Sweet Nothings, The Vocabulary of Sugar in Wine
WARNING: Things are about to get delightfully dorky. Side-effects may include (but are not limited to): spontaneous laughter, accidental learning, curiousity cravings, and an uncontrollable urge to share fun facts with friends.
The world of wine has a lot of vocabulary built up around the sweetness of wine and the term "DRY" might be one of the most confusing. Let's explore the topic of vocubulary as it relates to sugar in wine to gain a better understanding.
Dryness of a Wine
The word dry in the context of wine is an often misunderstood and understandably so because it doesn't speak to the drying sensation that occurs when you drink say a bold red as one might logically conclude. The term is actually used to describe the amount of sugar in the wine, not the sensation of dryness.
To make things more confusing there's no legal or universal standards in the US for defining a wine as dry, off-dry, semi-sweet, or sweet - every producer, region, and publication has slightly different definitions. There are two anchor points out of Europe though that give us some guidelines - namely the OIV classification used for still wines and France's legal definitions for Champagne often used for sparkling.
Based on those standards we've developed the table below for our wines. While we make primarily sparkling wines we find all the bands used in Champagne (Brüt Natural, Brüt, Extra-Brüt, Extra-Dry, Sec, Demi-Sec, Doux) confusing for most people and add little value over the OIV definitions. So, we take a hybrid approach between the OIV and Champagne.
Category | Residual sugar | What it tastes like |
Brüt Natural or Bone-Dry | Less than 3 g/L | Practically as low as fermentation can take a wine with no trace of sweetness on the palette. |
Dry | 3 to 9 g/L | Below the level of perceptible sweetness — your palate reads it as savory, mineral, or tart instead |
Off-Dry | 9 to 18 g/L | A whisper of sweetness — often felt more as roundness or fruit than actual "sweet" |
Semi-sweet | 18 to 45 g/L | Sweetness you can clearly name — think a fruity Riesling or a porch-sippin' rosé |
Sweet | More than 45 g/L | Dessert-wine territory — sweetness is the point, not an accident |
On Perception of Dryness & Sweetness
The most common confusion with "dryness" is in the perception of a wine, particularly reds, of drying our mouths out. That drying sensation is a result of the acidity and tannins in the wine. High acid wines (often sparkling & white wines) make us salivate creating a mouth watering sensation. High tannin wines (often reds) have the opposite effect of drying out our mouths. This happens for two reasons, first higher tannin wines are often lower in acid so we don't salivate as much AND those tannins act as little sponges soaking up our saliva. In either case, the perception of "dryness" in our mouths has nothing to do with sugar content.
And the perception of sugar can vary widely depending on the wine. Wines are chemically complex and no two wines are alike. Our perception of sugar in a wine is impacted by many factors including the acidity and tannin levels in the wine. Sour and sweet tastes counteract each other on our paletes so a wine with higher acid will taste less sweet than a wine with less acid at the same sugar level. Likewise bitter and sweet tasts counteract each other so a wine with higher tannin levels will taste less sweet than a wine with less tannins at the same sugar level.
One last thing worth mentioning is the perception of acidty. Local fruit is high in acid. As winemakers we can balance it / reduce the perception of acid by adding sugar. One of the reasons Indiana is known for sweet wines. Another option to balance the wine / reduce the perception of acid is through carbonation. With carbonation we can achieve balance at a lower sugar level. Carbonation thus allows us to make drier (less sugar) wines from local fruit.
Other Sweet Terms
Brix - An approximate measure of the % of sugar in grape juice. The sugar in the grape juice gets converted to alcohol during fermentation and generally has little do do with the final sugar in the wine.
Chaptalization - Chaptalization is the process where sugar is added to grape juice with the goal of boosting the alcohol content of the wine. This process is more common in colder climates or overcropped vineyards where the grapes don't fully ripen.
Residual Sugar - The amount of sugar left in the wine after fermentation, usually expressed in grams per liter (g/L). During fermentation the yeast never fully convert all of the sugar so the sugar content of a wine will always be greater than 0. And every fermentation is different so the residual sugar can vary a bit. For example, the sugar levels in our Pinot Noir (0.6g/L) and Riesling Natur (3g/L) are both 'residual' meaning we didn't add sugar to sweeten the wine, it's just what the yeast left in the bottle when they were done.
Residual sugar can also be used to refer to the final sugar in the wine when it was bottled, which can be different than the sugar left from fermentation when the winemaker adds sugar to the wine in a process called back-sweetening.
Back-sweetening - So if the grapes don't determine the sweetness of a wine what does? The answer is the winemaker. Winemakers add sweetness to wine to adjust the finished wine. Using cooking terms, back-sweetening is like seasoning to taste at the very end of the process. The source of sweetness can be a number of additives, most often it's sugar cane or juice concentrates.
Dosage - Sparkling wine's / champagne's term for backsweetening. In the sparkling wine world the dosage is a sugar & wine mixture added after removing the yeast through disgorgment. Same instinct, different wine, different moment in the process.
Clear as mud? I know the terminology and varying usage of terms can be a bit dizzying but hang in there. As you dive into the topic it all starts making sense. And one of the best ways of learning is to sit down and experience it. Join us for a Wine Lover's Experience where we dive into these and more aspects of wine and food to learn how the two can be joined in harmony to enhance any celebration or gathering.
Are you local to or visiting Central Indiana? Come taste the sugar scale for yourself. Try one of our wine flights and explore everything Indiana has to offer from brüt natural sparkling to a semi-sweet fruit infused wine. Sip even our sweetest wines and rest easy knowing it's less sugar but just as delicious than your coffee order. ;)
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